I admit, I have a beautiful life. I don’t mean to brag, but I love the life I have and there is no other life I’d rather live. This wasn’t always my truth.
Many years ago, I didn’t think I would one day have a beautiful life. I had a terrible attitude, a soul-sucking job that I occasionally enjoyed, superficially at best, and I pursued things that would always leave me feeling empty. It took me a long time and a lot of work to get to where I am. but it took me a while to accept it. The only reason I don’t give my work away is that I don’t want to get fired from my job, that and there is also the fear that if I do give it away the people in my life and I will no longer be able to feed my “entirety.” In 2018 I got a job that changed all of that. It taught me that giving away your time to something that improves your life has the potential to positively impact the lives of people around you. You don’t need to have a bank account to afford your truest friends and love. And if you’re ready to use your time for a noble purpose then don’t operate in the shadows. Start today. The biggest problem with free intentionally is I think it fails to make you strong. When you tell yourself that you wish to make stuff of your life intentionally, you are literally making stuff of it. That’s the first step. The second step is knowing INFPs what making stuff of your life means. The third step is the step that gets you agile and ready to take on life. To put it simply, you don’t (want to) make stuff of your life by not having it. Some people will tell you that you need to start by creating something to your heart’s content before you can start making stuff of your life. However, since the first step of pursuing your craft is to have a skill (talent), to grow your "talent" you need things to look at. By starting with creating already, you’ll be less likely to (want to) pursue your craft. What is this “stuff” you create? Well, beside basically anything that isn’t a total waste of time (like my ramen picture) you only truly create stuff when you put time and energy into your craft. This article on Hubpages is great to get you started. Ways to make stuff of your life are endless. Some people like to make jewelry from their pets. I like to make videos out of old journals. I also made so many sweaters out of old sweaters. If you like making notes out of colorful paper then by all means make notes out of colored cards. And if that’s not your forte then several pages in a book. It doesn’t really matter what you make as long as you do it. I’m not the greatest at anything, and I’m certainly not the greatest at making anything.
. I’m not saying that my existence is perfect. You could find someone more interesting than me and have a far better life than me. “How do you do it, man?” “Man, I’m head over heels in love with you.” “Wow, you can fly!” But to be perfectly honest, this is never going to be the case for me. I am not going to walk hand in hand down the aisle to marry the one I love, no matter how beautiful she may be or how beautiful her husband may be. This would never work. As complicated and enmeshed as the human condition can get, it’s one thing to deal with in small doses. It’s another to compound a complicated, tangled web of issues. And that’s exactly what most of us do to an extent that I find utterly disgusting. People that treat life as if it’s nothing, that keep their selfishness in check— that’s what I’m referring to. Life isn’t about accomplishing complex goals, please beat that Elon Musk. Life isn’t about having a perfect life, knock that Bill Gates. Life isn’t about giving your gold digger a tiara, bend that Mr. Miyagi. Why is this the beginning and end of every life? For some reason, most people think that happiness is the result of doing the right things. It’s through positive action, after all, that we can achieve the goal of happiness. Does positive action mean sitting around doing nothing? After all, that’s clearly not what happiness is. Furthermore, for most people, happiness has a primary place in their life. People that live fulfilling lives for the right reasons are content with their limited responsibilities. Gordon Gekko says it best: life is exactly one moment in time. We must continuously remind ourselves of this, or else we’ll fall into the trap of pursuing happiness at the expense of everything else. The single most important lesson I’ve learned about life is this: No matter how thrilling it may occur to pursue happiness in the pursuit of my dreams, most people end up aborting their dreams when they realize the path they’ve taken. I was an aspiring writer, a successful entrepreneur, and a copywriter. All of the paths led to failure, spirit level, and little to-do. Your happiness is predicated on a reality check. The reality check doesn’t lie in achieving something in life, it lies in knowing your worth. Ask yourself who you are today. Ask yourself what you’re meant to do in life.
. Someone else’s definition will probably differ from yours. My goal was to be at peace with myself, with what I experienced and with my life, no matter where it led. I achieved this self-acceptance in many areas. Most of these achievements are incredibly boring to me now, but they were crucial in getting to where I’m at. Once I achieved this state of self-acceptance, I then focused on learning and developing the skills that would help me live a beautiful life. Don’t spend all your time on what you don’t have. Most people who make a big show of having lots of stuff end up disorganizing it and wasting time. Why go through the constant mental and emotional pain of cleaning out a closet when you could be spending that time actually obtaining the things you want? Neglect is the enemy of contentment. If you don’t have things you really love, then try and find contentment with the things you do have. If you can still find meaningful meaning in life even if some of the things you do have aren’t completely perfect, then take your actions and responsibilities in your hands rather than your pockets or to-do lists, and you’ll start to make progress towards your happiness. My own version of the “scary” houseguest scenario. Once I started deleting all the things I didn’t need, I realized that I could effectively curate my life according to what I truly wanted. Not according to what society or my family wanted. This allowed me to mentally say goodbye to nearly all my possessions. It’s hard to keep up with keeping up with all the things you want but there’s no need to go crazy. It’s fine to take a few things from time to time, but generally speaking, if we only accumulate items that don’t thrill or engage us then we won’t be moving forward in a positive direction. Remember the part of the book “The Anxiety Circ of History” that said you have to ‘spend some time to know and love yourself’ to build momentum? The curious case of Tesla shows that there’s something to this advice. The one consistent benefit of this entire process was that I saw all my possessions on their rightful place: on my shelf, in their rightful place, in my closet, or in the donation bin, so they didn’t take up anymore room in my life and neither did I feel guilty about taking them from the stack because I didn’t need them.
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